EP:53 - Kiev Burning

Summary

Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton

Episode 53: Kiev Burning

Date: July 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this Independence Day edition of "Provoked," Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton explore the interplay between the psychology of conflict, the founding myths of America, and the modern cycle of violence—keying in on the war in Ukraine and its global reverberations. The episode opens with an unscripted discussion of the American Revolution, moves through deep reflections on grand historical forces and individual agency, and lands hard on the realities and risks of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, all while mixing in engaging asides and listener questions.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The American Revolution: Myth, Reality, and Legacy

[01:20–07:06]

• Debunking Myths: Darryl Cooper urges a sober look at the American Revolution, stripping away mythology to highlight the mixture of idealism, economic interests, and westward expansion among the Founders.

  "There's no doubt that they had in mind that this was an opportunity to refashion a society from scratch…a lot of idealism involved and nobility, but…also a lot of economic interests." — Daryl Cooper [01:50]

• Historical Greatness: Both hosts marvel at the “concentration of world historical personalities and intellects” among the American Founders.

  “You’d be lucky if you get one of those guys in a generation, you know? And they had like two dozen of them in one place at the same time.” — Daryl Cooper [05:30]

• Complex Patriotism: Scott Horton reflects on learning libertarianism from Founding Fathers and the tension between idealism in revolutionary rhetoric and realities post-independence.

  "I really like the stuff they said when they were overthrowing the old one. And there's so much quotable stuff there…” — Scott Horton [04:24]

• American Identity & Cynicism: Horton pushes back on hyper-cynical, deconstructionist takes, insisting on balancing critique with appreciation for what’s been good in America and its founding.

2. Grand Historical Forces vs. Individual Agency

[14:41–25:14]

• Carol Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: The hosts dive into Quigley's theory of civilizational rise and decline, emphasizing how military technology (especially weapon parity) shapes liberty and government structure.

  "He kind of traces the rise and fall of liberty just through weaponry...when the average guy had access to approximately the same type of sword technology, they were relatively free." — Scott Horton [16:54]

• Weapon Systems and Social Change: Daryl Cooper elaborates on how technological changes (e.g., chariots, phalanxes, mass conscription) dictate who wields power, impacting societal organization and citizen agency.

  “It builds up people's sense of where they sit in their society … as we moved into mass conscription armies…guys came back from World War I and they had a different sense of their relationship to their country.” — Daryl Cooper [20:00]

• Information War’s Modern Turn: Discussion of how nuclear-armed great powers have shifted conflict from direct war to propaganda and economic struggles.

3. Ukraine, Russia, and the New Psychology of Conflict

[32:48–55:52]

• Attrition and Stalemate: The hosts dissect both sides’ rhetoric in Ukraine’s war—Russia’s slow grind and Ukraine’s maximalist claims—emphasizing that both are “wars of attrition” with little prospect for decisive victory without state collapse.

  "A war of attrition…you’re trying to bring the other side's whole society, its economy, its political system…drive it to the point that it comes apart." — Daryl Cooper [34:26]

• Elite Hatred of Russia: Cooper asks why Western elites, especially in Britain and the US, have such a “homicidal attitude” toward Russia. Horton’s take: much is shaped by institutional culture and longstanding grievances, not just geopolitics.

  “There’s this like really visceral hatred of Russia...the Soviet desk was stood up all by people who were, you know, run out by Stalin or were refugees from...the Bolshevik revolution…” — Daryl Cooper [45:12]

• Escalation Risks: Both express concern that slow escalation, especially with European allies pushing boundaries (e.g., providing long-range missiles), could trigger direct NATO-Russia conflict.

  “We are risking [nuclear war] and we have increased the risk by whatever percentage...people are just whistling past the graveyard on this stuff.” — Scott Horton [53:14]

• Nuclear Dread: Horton recounts nuclear war scenarios and the historical caution of statesmen. Both stress: while nuclear use is unlikely, the consequences are so catastrophic that any increase in risk is dangerous.

  “600,000 is what we lost in the Civil War and we haven’t gotten over that in a hundred years.” — JFK, quoted by Scott Horton [55:26]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Founders’ Genius: "There's never been such a collection of intellect at this table since Jefferson dined alone." — Scott Horton (quoting JFK) [05:41]
• On American Cynicism: “It's bad to be so cynical that you don't see the good in things.” — Scott Horton [08:17]
• On Expanding Military Technology: "The only institution that could do that were gigantic nation-states...the nation-state became the apex predator institution on the whole planet." — Daryl Cooper [22:00]
• On Ukraine War’s Futility: “Imagine just for either side, for that to happen would be just such a complete and total disaster...” — Daryl Cooper [34:26]
• On Anti-Russian Institutional Memory: “The culture was still the same. And it really takes like a revolutionary sort of…leader…to turn something like that around.” — Daryl Cooper [45:35]
• On Nuclear Risk: “It's unthinkable, man...With just one or two of [these weapons]...you could kill a major city.” — Scott Horton [55:15]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:20] — Opening discussion on the Declaration of Independence’s meaning, causes, and founding myths.
• [05:30] — The unique historical concentration of intellect among the Founders.
• [14:41] — Carol Quigley’s "Tragedy and Hope" and the rise and fall of civilizations.
• [16:54] — The role of weapon parity in liberty.
• [20:00–25:14] — How mass conscription and weapon technology shape society.
• [32:48–37:57] — Attrition in the Ukraine war; shifting Western media tone.
• [45:12–52:25] — Why US/UK official culture is so anti-Russian.
• [53:14–55:52] — On nuclear escalation, strategic rationality, and why risk remains existential.
• [67:57–74:12] — Discussion of Jordan Peterson, cultural psychology, and generational anxieties.

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Audience Q&A highlights

• History professor path: Daryl urges open-mindedness; the traditional academic route is competitive, but independent channels (podcasts, writing) can reach far more people today.

  "There are a lot of ways to…make it work for you…keep your options open, man." — Daryl Cooper [79:08]

• On Russian leadership post-Putin:

  “We should be thanking our lucky stars that we have someone who is so cool, calm and collected [in Putin]...Virtually any Russian man you put in there is going to be more of an emotional case than this guy. And boy, do they have a lot to be upset about.” — Scott Horton [80:07]

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Tone and Format

• The tone is conversational, unfiltered, and occasionally irreverent, mixing high-level historical analysis with pointed personal views and anecdotal asides.
• Both hosts riff off each other’s expertise—Horton as the libertarian anti-war journalist, Cooper as the reflective historian with a keen eye on systems and psychology.

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Conclusion

"Kiev Burning" weaves together deep history, present dangers, and the psychology beneath state violence. Cooper and Horton highlight the peril in current American and European strategies toward Russia—an institutionalized antipathy unmoored from strategic sense. They warn, especially on this Independence Day, that the lessons of history are not to be ignored: civilizations fall, empires overreach, and nuclear risk must never be minimized.

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Listener Call to Action:
Follow them at @ProvokedShow on X and YouTube, subscribe for future episodes, and challenge the "propaganda algorithm" by sharing the show.

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(This summary skips all ads, sponsorships, and non-content banter, focusing solely on the episode’s substantive discussion.)

Transcript

[Daryl Cooper]

All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break.

[Scott Horton]

Humans Negotiate now end this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is Provoked. All right. It is Thursday. Provoked Today. Thursday is interviews of me all day long. Day. Fridays, I do interviews. Thursdays is interviews of me. But now on Thursday night, since it's our new time, I interview Daryl Cooper every Thursday night. Hey, man. How are you?

[Daryl Cooper]

Good, but I don't know if I like that format. I like listening to you talk more than I like listening to myself.

[Scott Horton]

Well, I like listening to me talk, too, but I've been hearing me all damn day today, so I'm gonna ask you stuff. So, obviously we got to talk about Ukraine and we got to talk about Iran and things, Israel and whatever, but maybe we should start off talking about Independence Day, since today is the actual Independence Day. They voted for independence on the 2nd, right? They just approved the Declaration.

[Daryl Cooper]

No, no. Quit trying to take my birthday, July 4th, away from me. Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Okay. Well, no, I mean, you can have that, too. That is Independence Day. But today is the day that they actually voted for the thing. And anyway, like, any. Any comments on the causes which impel this separation or what?

[Daryl Cooper]

Man, oh, man, that's a big topic. I should have prepared more for that, given the date. But, you know, there's.

[Scott Horton]

How it said it. I have the Declaration right there. I just can't read it from here.

[Daryl Cooper]

There's some very interesting work that's out there these days. Some of it's actually really old, but it's sort of resurfacing lately about the American Revolution that, you know, sort of tries to. Tries to pull it out of its mythological context, you know, of, like, guys who chop down cherry trees and stuff, fighting for freedom and really just get down to what were the interests of the people who pushed this thing, what is it they were really trying to do? And, you know, there's no doubt that they had in mind that this was an opportunity to refashion a society from scratch. Scratch in a way that really was kind of unique in human history. And they were trying to do that. And there, you know, there was a lot of idealism involved and nobility, but, you know, also a lot of economic interests. You know, a lot of this desire for expansion to the west and, you know, to gain land holdings in the west and these things. And I think all of it's really interesting. And, you know, I like to think of the American Revolution sort of As a, I mean, it's really what it was. It's a civil war, right? It's a British Civil war. And it was a, you know, it was, it was a time when, you know, we think about it now because maybe because the French Revolution and Napoleon came so soon afterwards that, you know, they were really embarking on an experiment, a kind of project that didn't have a whole lot of examples they could look to short of, you know, sort of going through the, you know, limited number of, of, of historical pieces we have on Rome and Greece and things and. Yeah, I don't know. What about you? Sorry, I was not ready for that question.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I know we said, we talked. We never planned the show very good, but. That's right, we, we don't plan it well, which is good. Listen, I don't know, man. I learned all my libertarianism stuff from the Founding Fathers before I ever heard of Murray Rothbarder, all that. I mean, I love Ron Paul and all that, but I'd read his weekly column and everything. But I read a lot, especially like in high school and junior college years there. I've read a lot of, especially Jefferson, you know, notes on Virginia and whatever. There's a bunch of different things, letters between him and Madison, letters between him and Adams over the years and all kinds of stuff. And there's just so many great quotables if you're a young anti government extremist type, you know, it's almost like finding the Mises Institute. It's like, wow, they're real ass adults who agree with me about this stuff.

[Daryl Cooper]

Rat.

[Scott Horton]

Well, here is. Thomas Jefferson agrees with me about this stuff, you know, and on a lot of stuff. And now it's funny because these are the guys who created the new regime too. But I really like the stuff they said when they were overthrowing the old one. And there's so much quotable stuff there and, and just, you know, if one of the things to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else, man, all of that.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, one of the things I find so fascinating about that period is, I mean, when you try to compare it to our like modern, modern examples, just the collection, the concentration of really like world historical personalities and intellects like in one place at the same time. I mean, just, it's really amazing that you had a collection of people like the founders. And that's not just like. I like reading books that are sort of, you know, critical in the academic sense of the revolutionary period. I'm not, you know, I'm not Trying to just be some sort of a rah rah chauvinist on this or something. It's just. I think it's objectively true.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah, I agree, guys.

[Daryl Cooper]

It's just amazing. Like, you're. You'd be lucky if you get one of those guys in a generation, you know? And they had like two dozen of them in one place at the same time. Just amazing.

[Scott Horton]

That was the JFK quote where he had assembled all these Nobel Prize winners or whoever I think it was. Nobel Prize winners to eat dinner. And he said, there's never been such a collection of intellect at this table since Jefferson dined alone.

[Daryl Cooper]

And.

[Scott Horton]

Which is true. You know, I read. I was just. I was musing about this with Gareth Porter recently. There's a letter. I have a book of letters between Jefferson and Madison. And in one of those, he's stranded in France being the ambassador while they're doing the Constitutional Convention and all of that stuff. He's over there and he writes a letter home to Madison. He's like, oh, man, it sucks here. It's all cold and rainy and it bothers me. And, you know, I opened my window and it's actually kind of cool, you know, the way they designed this window. The air comes in, but the rain doesn't. And here's how I think they did it. And then he goes on for, like, 17 pages of these, like, schematics and all this geometry. And just like, this is Isaac Newton writing about how this window was designed to let the air in but keep the rain out. Like, wow, this guy's really smart, dude. You know what I mean?

[Daryl Cooper]

He is. I always, like. I like Washington, like, letters. Washington wrote, like, from the battlefield. You know, they're like, in between bloody battles. And he's writing letters back home, and it's like, hi, yeah, war's going all right, you know, Lost some men yesterday. Really sad about that. And then, like, 12 pages of micromanaging every detail of how his house is being redesigned and stuff.

[Scott Horton]

Good times. All right, listen, this is what I was supposed to say at the beginning, so I'll say it now. Expat money, they sponsor this show, and it's Mikhail Thorup, and he's a really good dude. I know him. I met him and I tour. I toured Mayan ruins with him. So that's how, you know he's a good dude. Essentially, he's been an American expat all around the world for 25 years, and he's the expert on how to be an expat. And what you do is you go to expatmoney.comprovoked, that's expatmoney.com provoked. And you get a free copy of Oh, I didn't know about this one. What the hell is this? Oh, I need to page up and set it down this one here. Plan B, residencies and instant citizenships. You will get this free. Just go to expatmoney.com provoked and essentially it's your plan B for protecting your neck, protecting your family in case when the empire falls, it's worst case scenario. Or maybe you're just trying to beat the purchasing power parody problems we have here in our falling empire. But anyway, so expatmoney.com make sure we get our money's worth by adding slash provoked at the end of it there and now. Yeah, look. So also, hey, it's the 250th and I'm a july 76 baby. Not exactly born on the 4th like you and Ron Kovic, but oh no, you're on the second.

[Daryl Cooper]

No, you're on the fourth.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, that's rad. So I ain't that I'm July 13th, but I am 76 though, so I'll be 50 in a couple of weeks. And but that makes me like automagically patriotic. You know, I've always been raised with that declaration of Independence sort of celebrations around the time of my birthday and things like that. And the have a little silver dollar from when I was born, the 76 silver dollar on it. So yeah, like all that stuff, man, I got an American flag out front for all the neighbors. I just moved into a new house, so I got to make sure that the neighbors know that I got a nice box full of firecrackers for everybody to celebrate with and everything. Torture our poor animals with on Saturday. And then, yeah, also see, the thing is, this man is everything is so commie and so like deconstructionist and whatever. I don't really know what post modernism actually means, but I think it's when like people pretend that things don't mean things anymore or whatever. And like, I get it, you should deconstruct things because a lot of things are and you shouldn't believe in them. On the other hand, it's bad to be so cynical that you don't see the good in things. And you know, I admit I only got a part way into it before I had to get back to work on other stuff. But there's this really great series by Murray Rothbard, this collection of books, five part series called Conceived in Liberty. And they actually only published part five recently because one guy was like, oh, I can read this handwriting. Where the others had. Were like, well, I don't know what

[Daryl Cooper]

to do with this.

[Scott Horton]

But one guy was like, oh, yeah, no problem. It was, I believe, Jonathan Newman, maybe over at Mises. And so they just published volume five of Rothbard's History of the Founding of the United States of America. And I started reading. It's all about Jamestown and this and that, and of course it's Rothbard. And so it's all, you know, whatever the title is, Conceived in Liberty. So it's, you know, playing up all those parts of it, but really good stuff. And I mean, one day to figure out how to stop time and catch up and spend a summer reading all that stuff, like, very carefully and all that. But there's so much good in the founding this country and in the country as it has been this whole time, too. And I really hate the way the government calls itself the country, because then it means that the country is guilty of all the stupid, horrible things that the government did, which is not really true. And there's been millions and millions and millions of people who've lived here this whole time and had, you know, relatively free and great lives and high standards of living and had the satisfaction of being able to take care of their people and all these things over a couple centuries here and, like, done pretty damn good. There's a bunch of slop like this. There was a new. A Wall Street Journal article. I guess I clicked on it. So now the computer God, like, sent me a thousand different versions of this on YouTube where it's Europeans here for the soccer games, tripping out over buc ee. And I love.

[Daryl Cooper]

I love that whole genre, dude. I'm so here for that genre.

[Scott Horton]

And the thing is that, like, no, they're right, dude. America is badass. I saw a thing where they were, like, freaking out because this was a couple years ago, was on Google Earth. There's this one spaghetti and meatballs highway interchange in Houston that if you overlay,

[Daryl Cooper]

it's the size of an entire city in Italy.

[Scott Horton]

It's just this one spaghetti and meatballs highway interchange. And they just can't get their head around that. But I'm like, yeah, dude, I'm from Texas, like, and I got Texas patriotism, you know, before and deeper than my American patriotism either, even. But anyway, so I am a patriot, and I like all the good stuff and ignore all the bad stuff. It's like watching the Star Wars Prequels, man, you gotta get the good out of it that you can. You know what I mean? This is our country.

[Daryl Cooper]

I am gonna, I'm gonna incur your wrath here. But I have only seen the first Star wars prequel.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, that's okay, man. Don't worry about it. And listen, for that matter, for you and for everybody else listening, if you're gonna watch Star Wars, Star wars, don't watch any of the new stuff. You gotta get, go on the Pirate Bay and get the D Specialized edition or the silver screen.

[Daryl Cooper]

I saw Rogue One. That was good.

[Scott Horton]

Rogue One was good. But I'm saying all this stuff where they took the original Star wars movies and George Lucas tinkered with them all, virtually all those changes are negative to the story. Virtually all those changes detract from the real original ass versions that came out. And you can get high quality versions of the original ass versions. They're called the despecialized verses and you can find them on the. And in fact, if you're interested in the prequels at all, there's the anti cheese edits of the prequels where they cut out as much of the crap as they could to try to make, you know, the story of the fall of the Republic still like somehow preventable.

[Daryl Cooper]

So if nothing else, they, it, the, the, the, the prequels did give us that ever fruitful meme with young Anakin doing the, doing the Face with Natalie Portman. That, that.

[Scott Horton]

Oh yeah, yeah, that was a good one. Well, dictatorship, huh?

[Daryl Cooper]

If it were my favorite one of those that I've ever seen was that Anakin says and sorry grandma, I'm going to curse right here, but I have to, I'm quoting something Anakin says. Our politicians are children. And she says, I know, they're so immature, right? They're so immature, right?

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, terrible stuff. And then what's I gonna say about the fourth of July thing, man? There was one more thing on my mind there I want to say about America and the fourth of July. I can't think of what it is though. It's the one war in American history that I approve of. I used to like War of 1812, but then I learned more about it and that was just an evil aggressive war to seize Canada I shouldn't have done.

[Daryl Cooper]

There is no such thing as an evil war against Britain. Come on.

[Scott Horton]

And then let's see, what was the other thing about the fourth of July? And something tells me something over my shoulder is going to remind me what it was. Oh, I was going to mention something about what you were saying there? I think it's Charles Austin Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. I have that somewhere, which is pretty good. I was going to say something about Jefferson mentioned the Rothbard thing. I don't know. MAN

[Daryl Cooper]

Aboard. Oh, I know what it was, man.

[Scott Horton]

See, I just needed to wonder for

[Daryl Cooper]

a little while longer.

[Scott Horton]

Cooper. And it is over on my shoulder here. It's just not on the Founding Father section. It's a row below Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time by Carol Quigley. It's sort of the conspiracy Cook Bible because he was Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown University and also John Basil Utley's professor and, and so, and he admits a lot of true things about the Rockefeller world empire, sort of establishment and how they run things and all that. The book came out in 1866 and it has a lot of cool stuff in there. Particularly on page 950 is the great quote about, you know, the only reason to let there be Republicans and Democrats, these two parties, one to supposedly represent the conservatives and the other liberals, is just so the American people can throw those rascals out every eight or even four years if necessary, without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy.

[Daryl Cooper]

Dude, that was like, that was like a goodwill hunting style page pull right there. Respect.

[Scott Horton]

I, I, yeah, I read Quigley, but listen, so you show, have you read

[Daryl Cooper]

the Anglo American Establishment is one say that.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, read that too. But so this is just from the preface or the forward, I think from Tragedy and Hope. And he wrote a whole, you know, textbook called the Evolution of Civilizations that I haven't read. But so he has this theory and in fact, a mutual friend of ours, I think you know this guy. Well, anyway, I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but. Yeah, no, Pat McGeehan from West Virginia, the, from the House of Representatives there, who he led the Defend the Guard efforts all those years. Pat McGee, he's really smart man. He's, you know, real historian type like you. And he was saying that this is all and whatever, but it seemed smart to me the way Quigley says in the, in the forward. In fact, this is even the, the title of the book, Tragedy and Hope. People always think of him as just like a Rockefeller World Empire guy and the evil bad guy and whatever, which. Okay, whatever, he's in on it. But the title of the book means the tragedy is that all civilizations come and go. They rise and fall. And the worst thing that happens to major powers is, is they become world empires and then they kill themselves through over Expansion. And he talks about how the west has been really lucky to be able to reinvent itself over and over again. From ancient Greece to Rome to Christendom. And then through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the rise of America and all of these things. Where the west somehow is still the West. Even though it's gone through all of these, you know, major changes and all that. But that ultimately there's nothing magical about it. And it could die. And the danger is that we embrace world empire. That was what he called it. If we embrace world empire, the next step is death. It's murder, suicide. So that. That's the tragedy. But the hope is that we'll read his history book and we'll learn from it. That you should be conservative and you should be careful. And you should preserve your limited republic and not embrace empire. Because embracing empire, it feels good at first, but ultimately it leads to certain death. And so that's what the tragedy and hope is even about in the title, by the way, makes him sound much more of like a Bircher, the kind of guy who would quote him. But anyway, he also. He says in that forward that it's just coincidental, basically, that at the time that the ships were good enough to get Europeans across the ocean to settle. North America was right at the time that muskets were good enough and cheap enough that the average schmuck could have one. Or at least the average town militia could have some. And that was enough to tilt the balance of power. And he kind of traces the rise and fall of liberty just through weaponry and says that, like, when the average guy had access to approximately the same type of sword technology, they were relatively free. And then when some jerk invented the saddle, then that in, you know, created

[Daryl Cooper]

the special book just on this topic, actually, I've got around here somewhere. It's really interesting. It's an unfinished, unpublished book that came out after he died, I believe. It's called Weapon Systems and Systems of Government, something like that. It's been a while since I read it, but it's a whole book on this topic you're talking about. I. I was so, like. I read Tragedy and Hope and Anglo American Establishment. Like, way back when I was on my sort of, you know, post Spangler, like, big history theory phase. And. And I got interested in just that. That topic. The relation of weapons technology with systems of government. And then I found out he had a whole book on it. And he goes through, like, all of that stuff. And part of it is that, yeah, the average dude has access to the Same weaponry as, you know, an aristocrat or whatever your equivalent is at the time. But it's also that, you know, he talks about how it's not just military technology or weaponry itself, it's weapon systems in like a very large sense. Right. So for ex, like, like military structures itself. So if you have a, if you have a, a world where the battlefield is dominated by bronze chariots that only, you know, basically the big landowners can afford and keep the horses, just whatever, and these things are so dominant on the battlefield that they can just run over your infantry army, no problem. Then you're going to have a super concentrated power structure in a very aristocratic society as opposed to, if you look at, you know, like, well, ancient Athens, for example, where the phalanx was, you know, the, the, the primary weapon system or war, war fighting system. You need every citizen, you know, you need every guy to stand his ground, hold his shield up to guard his neighbor. And people start to understand that, yeah, they actually, I, I'm, I'm necessary for this whole project to work and like it, it builds up people's sense of where they sit in their society. And I don't think it's really a, a big coincidence either that as we in the modern era started to move into, you know, an era where like mass conscription armies became the norm, if you wanted to compete at the highest level, you had to be able to put 5 or 6 million men in the field and keep them there, you know, for years. And when you do that though, and you saw this like a million examples of this, you know, guys came back from World War I and they had a different sense of their relationship to their country, right? And you know, and so you saw these, the collapse of the empires, these democratic movements and things. And you know, it's interesting to think about like in the modern age here where, you know, we, we went through this process in the modern era where, you know, mass conscription armies first became, you know, became sort of the, the, the necessary war fighting system if you were going to, you know, compete at the high level. And the only institution on earth that could do that were gigantic nation states. Basically the nation state became the apex predator institution on the whole planet because they were the only ones who could actually field large armies. And then as you moved in, got to like World War II and to the early Cold War, you got to this part where okay, yeah, you start to be able to put mass conscription armies out there, but you got to have carrier fleets, you got to have, you got to be able to pump Out a thousand aircraft, ten thousand aircraft, you know, a month or a year to stay in a war. And now you're at a point where that institution, like the, the nation state structure had become, had like maximized its efficiency.

[Scott Horton]

Basically.

[Daryl Cooper]

It like reached its zenith in terms of just the, the, the path of that, of, of that structure. And like, you know, a nation state again is something we kind of take for granted, but it really isn't. And you know, when you get into the Cold War where nuclear weapons become a thing, then it becomes kind of very interesting, right, because you have this shift from, you know, there's still a lot of wars, there's still bad wars, even, you know, millions of people being killed and everything. But in terms of great powers, you don't have that. And there was this. Because it was basically impossible for great powers to go to war with each other, there was a shift where like a huge part of the, the direct conflict between great powers started taking place in the information warfare, you know, area. And you know, it became, I mean, really like between the US and the Soviets, propaganda warfare was really like the primary that and economic warfare, I guess you could say, but they kind of play off of each other. And it's really interesting today, right, where you get to a point where maybe the Gulf War would be like the, the perfect example of like you just, it's, it looked like in 1991, like, you know, if you could put stealth bombers in the air and if you could field these super high tech, super expensive systems and be able to do that, then you were just going to be completely untouchable. That's what it looked like in 1991. I think that's what people still thought in 2001, 2003. But as we've gotten up into the 2010s, and especially, you know, since Ukraine and, and the war with Iran started and everything is, you really start to see now, you know, a shift back to a place where, you know, small groups, even individuals can have the destructive power of like, you know, states back in the day. I mean, they can cause serious, serious problems with whether it's drones or explosives, you know, these type of things. And, and so it's, it's going to be very interesting to see how that affects, you know, just sort of the way we're ruled. You know, if you, if you take the, this theory seriously.

[Scott Horton]

Right. So, yeah, so what he's saying there in, in tragedy and hope is that the era of America's founding was the era of the musket and that so the guys on saddles had lost their advantage because now you could reach out and touch them at range. And so now things were sort of power was spread out in that way that you say as it ebbs and flows, it was ebbing at that time, right, when they were overthrowing the government and writing the constitution and justifying it all with an ideology of liberty that they could back up with arms that they had that made the townsmen basically as powerful as any state. The state was them. Right. As we know, in the foundation, the tradition of the foundation of this country, the military was the militia and the militia was the men. Yeah, right.

[Daryl Cooper]

And it was, you know, it made the, the townsman with a musket equal to, you know, the cavalry aristocrat, horse rider guy. But also what it did is it made it possible to train a soldier in a very short period of time. Like in the, you know, in the mid old days war fighting was a vocation. I mean you had to be, you know, knights trained to fight non stop, like from the time they were children and you had professional armies that, you know, mercenary armies and others. I mean they're like, you know, we've dug up skeletons of English longbowmen and these guys would train so much that like their skeletons were literally like warped and shaped by how much they would be pulling the. Drawing these bowstrings back. And that took, it took a huge amount of time to be able to do that. You know, I remember in one of Dan Carlin's series on the fall of the Roman Republic, he, he is talking about their, you know, the military side of things. And he said that a Roman slinger, you know, like a, like a slings like throw a stone with a whatever that they had to be able to hit a man sized target at 195 yards consistently in order to be accepted. I'm like, that's two football fields away. They had to be able to hit a man sized target. That is crazy. That takes a lot of time. I mean it's not something you can do when there's smartphones in the world, you know. And like once you had muskets and then obviously like, you know, more advanced guns later, it made it so that you could train up a soldier in eight weeks and send them out into the field. And that made it a lot easier to stand up larger armies. It always trips me out watching those old like, you know, the, the days of the British red coat and even the civil war where the style of fighting like it just, it seems so stupid and and so ridiculous. Like, you would never want to be in that war where you're literally just standing in a line and like, hoping you're not the guy who gets it, you know, and. And you're like, how could this ever have worked? But then you think back and man, like, you know, if you go to the 1500s, like, Spanish infantry was basically invincible. Like, if they showed up at your doorstep, it was over. It was just they. For a long time, like, the Spanish infantry was just. It was basically invincible. And the British red coat man, like, there was, like there were. There was a good 70 or 80 years or so that if dudes in red jackets showed up in your country, it was a wrap. I mean, it is just nobody could stop them. And yeah, I, I would not want to be in a war like that, though.

[Scott Horton]

All right, here's some more business Expat money again. Expatmoney.com provoked to get your free plan B a guide there. Expatmoney.com provoked and Matt C. He is a tax lawyer for you small business folk out there and high salaried employees trying to find a way to protect your assets from the man so he doesn't tax what he hasn't already inflated away from you. Hang on to every last cent that you possibly can with the help of your new lawyer. Matt Cercley'[e-mail] and do we talk about doing Slash Scott or Provoked or whatever? Tell them me and Daryl sent you Matt [e-mail] and I'll go ahead and throw in one more here real quick. Moon Dose Artisan coffees. These are not children, by the way. Boy, did I get an angry email from Phil about.

[Daryl Cooper]

As soon as that came out of my mouth, I was like, what the hell is the matter with me? This is a sponsor. So I'm sorry, Phil, we should have cut that out.

[Scott Horton]

Well, the show's life. I told him you were just joshing around, man. And in fact, he wrote to me and, and very thoughtfully about how he actually does investigate. They have like the wholesale roasters and the specialty roasters or, or the specialty coffee harvesters. They're kind of separate. And he has actually looked very deeply into who's doing his coffee growing and harvesting there in Indonesia and which Sumatra and whatever these other places in order to be very careful and make very sure of that because he would not want to share in any kind of responsibility. So you just forget all that. It's all good. Mundo's Artisan Coffees and all you do go to Scott Horton.org coffee and. And it's free for me as long as you people keep buying it. So it's scotthorton.org Coffee and it's really good and it helps wake me up in the morning. And it'll work very well for you too. All right, so enough business. Now to other business. Let's talk about the wars.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, hold on. Before we jump into that, did you. Let's talk about something, just a smaller thing real quick. Do you see that couple on the Empire State Building?

[Scott Horton]

I did briefly.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

What was the. What was the flag. Anything good?

[Daryl Cooper]

I have no idea. I probably don't want to know. There are probably some gay ass anarchist commie types or something that I would hate and they hate me. It's fine. I don't care. I am unironically 100% supportive of them. Do not put me on whatever jury tries them. I will let them off just by just for being cool. That's got to be the coolest thing that ever happened on the New York city skyline since 74 when, you know, they put up that high wire between the twin towers covertly. And people went to work one day and they were like, what the hell is that? It was pretty cool. He. He proposed to her up there too. And it's like on helicopter camera. Dude, that's awesome. I don't care. So let. Let him go hire them, you know, maybe put them like in a. I don't know, some kind of special unit or something where they can go, you know, Spider man. But yeah, actually, that reminds me, speaking of the. The proposal.

[Scott Horton]

Get up there, man. Holy balls too man.

[Daryl Cooper]

Like that takes some balls to do that.

[Scott Horton]

And it's really high up there now. You want me to climb all the way up to the antenna on the tippy top?

[Daryl Cooper]

Forget one time, that one time when I was in Big Sur, which is this nice little, you know, beach redwood area in. In Central California. I was hiking on this one beach. Beautiful, beautiful beach where they have literally a waterfall that comes down off a cliff and lands on the beach. Really cool place. And this guy comes over and he asked me to record something with his phone because he's about to propose to his girlfriend. He kind of like does it on the slide. Like, oh yeah, I got you, I got you. And so he goes. And I hit the button and I'm going. And about halfway through, after she's already said yes and stuff, I realized that I missed the button and so I hit it. And then afterwards Dude, I. I feel so cowardly about this, but I don't care. I ran. I was like, here's your phone. Congratulations, my man. And I was gone. That dude never saw me again. That's so fun.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, hey, someone in the chat was asking about anarcho communism, so I'll just show this real quick. It's a Murray Rothbard article. The dash, the death wish of the anarcho communists. The bottom line is there's only two kinds of property, dude. Private property and public property. So if you abolish private property, then what do you got? The state. It's communism. There's no anarcho.

[Daryl Cooper]

What about, what about the commons, dude? The commons weren't like state run necessarily like English commons. Like in the villages before the enclosure acts, you know, you'd have your little plot of land for your garden, but you know, you don't have enough land to graze all of your. Your animals and stuff. And so the village shares a big plot of land. It all worked out perfectly. Perfectly well.

[Scott Horton]

Sounds tragic to me. I don't know, I'm not convinced. But anyway, there are people that call themselves anarcho syndicalists. Noam Chomsky and people like that call themselves anarcho commies of some kind or another. It's a. It's an ethos, you know, Donnie. But it's stupid. It's just Marxism. And then, oh, look, we got to talk about the war. Let's talk about the war. So old Russia been bombing the hell out of Kiev. And I thought somebody in the chat room made a good point that, like, I don't know, man, this kind of smacks of desperation on the part of the Russians here. Oh, I didn't hit add to the thing. They're bombing the crap out of Kiev. They're moving so slowly. And I know that both sides say that, well, it's a war of attrition. We're just chewing up the other side. We're not trying to move fast. And so like, who said we were trying to move fast? And I'm not. I think that also. I'm not sure, but that kind of sounds like a cope too. Like, I mean, obviously the Russian strategy or, or their, their strategic goals here are to take territory, and they're taking it real slow. And it's been four and a half years and they still don't have all of done Yetsk, and they still have so much more to go. And at the same time, there's all this propaganda about how the Ukrainians are turning the tide and kicking their ass, and they've, you know, finally unlocked the secret key to drone technology that's going to just undo everything that's happened so far, which is such a bunch of crap. And so. And I'm not sure what's even the point of that. Like, is there another appropriation coming up that they needed to build up a little bit of hype for or something? Otherwise, I don't know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Because the tone has definitely shifted over the last month, month and a half. I mean, you see all these pro Ukraine accounts and media personalities who have shifted from, you know, they shifted back, I should say, to this, like, you know, maximalist vision of Ukrainian victory, that, you know, the thing about a war of attrition like this, like when you have two bordering states fighting over a piece of land that is on their frontier, is you. You fight a war of attrition, just like in World War I. Like, what you're. Like what you're really going for at that point is, like, state collapse, Like a war of attrition in that sense, you know, is something where you're trying to bring the other side's whole society, its economy, its political system, you know, drive it to the point that it comes apart. And I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem very likely that either of those things are going to happen on either side in the near term. But then also, man, imagine just for either side, for that to happen would be just such a complete and total disaster, you know, and I don't know. It's hard. I. I understand the person who said it's max of desperation. Like, I could kind of see that. I think also, I think the Russians are, you know, it doesn't necessarily smack of desperation in the sense of, like, you know, they're on their last legs, and so they're. They're trying to, you know, do a battle of the bulge kind of thing. But it does maybe in the sense that, you know, they're just there. Like, what the. Like, look, the Russians did not bargain for this war. This is not the war that they thought they were getting. I mean, this has been much harder, much longer. No question about any of that. And they're in this place now where, you know, probably two years ago, three years ago, they were thinking, all right, we're just gonna have to settle in. We're gonna have to do this for a while, you know, kill a few hundred thousand Ukrainians and eventually, like, bring them to their senses. And getting to the point now, I'm just realizing that we might be in this for, like, the really long haul. Like, these guys, they just, they keep throwing meat at us. The west seems intent on just, you know, continuing to arm them and send them in here. And, you know, it's, you always hear from people that, that the stiffest opposition to Putin, you know, within the power structure over there is from the right, is from people who think he's too soft and too accommodating to the west and worries too much about how Russia is seen by the west and all that, and that they need to just take the gloves off. I, I, you know, that's what you read. I don't know if that's true. It makes sense to me. You know, it's very, it's pretty rare when you have a, a war like this one, where it is like a, you know, this isn't a foreign adventure on the other side of an ocean or something. This is a border war where your sort of generational enemy, NATO, is like, clearly, you know, driving the tank. And, you know, to have a war like that, to have his opposition be from the side that thinks they need to back down and, you know, and, and, and give back their gains, it seems very unlikely. It's just hard to understand exactly what the goal is here, you know, I, Other than, you know, maybe it's just like Dan Crenshaw said, Like a lot of these guys have said is it's just we get to trade dollars that we print, you know, anyway, for Russian bodies. Sounds like a good deal to me. You know, that's, that's like, what came out of Dan Crenshaw's mouth.

[Scott Horton]

And a collection of quotes like that in the book. Oh, man, bang for the buck we've ever got Lindsey Graham, but 10 more, you know, that's.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, so maybe it's just, you know, we're gonna, we've kind of accepted we're gonna throw a few hundred billion a year to just tie the Russians up, you know, and, and just do some damage to them, you know, try to harm their political system if we can. It's. It's really hard for me to understand, and I've tried to figure this out. And I know you. I mean, you, you gave, you put some meat on this bone in the book, like, a little bit, but you didn't drill down, like, super specific on it. It's like, what is the just absolutely homicidal attitude that Western elites have toward Russia? Like, where does that come from? I just don't get it. Like, there are especially, like, you Go to, like, Britain. Britain is like. I mean, they're like a mad dog when it comes to Russia, their political class, at least. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I get it back in the day, like, you know, the Mackinder Doctrine and all this kind of stuff, but you're not an empire anymore.

[Scott Horton]

Like, I think it's very shallow, dude. I think it's just, you know, this is a different topic, but it's the same damn thing. Basically. I interviewed a State Department guy named Wayne White one time, and he was talking about. We were discussing. This is like in 07, when Bush might go to war against him, actually. And we were discussing about Iran and why it makes no sense for America to fight against Iran when the enemy is the bin Ladenites and the Iranians could be our strategic allies, or at least we could leave them the hell alone. You know, this kind of. And he's like, listen, man, people are just still mad about the hostage crisis, right? Like, the State Department is just full of people who. They just don't like Iran, okay? Iran's the Great Satan. That's it. And so it's the same thing with Russia. Russia's. And I wish. Well, and maybe there are other reasons more complicated than this, but I don't really think so, man. You know, also, I guess one that Meimer, you know, really highlighted, and in real time, too, I think this is really correct, was that when they seized Crimea in reaction to the coup of 14, that then the foreign policy establishment had to come up with this story of why this happened and how it wasn't their fault. It was because Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to be evil. And so that was what happened. And that was when history started, was when he stole Crimea. And. And that it was essentially just an alibi. I mean, if you listen to the phone call, the famous phone call of Newland and Pyatt, she's saying. And they both say, we gotta glue it, we gotta stick it, we gotta make it sail, we gotta midwife it. We gotta get this thing done before Putin can react and torpedo it. We gotta get the thing. And then what happened? It wasn't easy, actually. It completely blew up in their face. And they lost Crimea within three weeks of that phone call or four weeks of that phone call, and Crimea was gone. Right? So they thought that they were smart and they were pulling it off. They didn't pull it off. It led to this horrific reaction. And so then they went, oh, well, yeah. Because what happened was that Putin. Why he got drunk and got real angry and did a mean thing or some excuse, you know, in 22, Condoleezza Rice, I think famously, or I hope famously, said that he must have a mental illness, because this is not the Vladimir Putin I know. And it's like, you're such a damn liar. Yes, it is, too. It's exactly the same guy.

[Daryl Cooper]

And we all know, yeah, it's the same guy from that cable she got from the Ambassador in 2008, just driving it to a T. That's right. And.

[Scott Horton]

And it's the same guy's been in power this whole time. And he's doing exactly what you were warned, lady, that he would do. And I, I remember this because I went on Fox News at the time on Kennedy's show, and I said, of course, Condoleezza Rice says that now he's mentally ill. It's because it's her fault, personally. She's the one who caused this to happen. So of course she says it's everybody else but her. But everybody here ought to know better. The real history is she shouldn't have done that. And she was told in no uncertain terms by the entire staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, most famously in the nyet means nyet memo. But, you know, Fiona Hill, for all of her later hypocrisy on this issue, she was the head of the Russia desk on the National Security Council at the time, or right there with Daniel Freed on the Russia desk. And she told the New York Times, and I guess believably so, that she told George W. Bush, don't you do this. The entire NSC is against it. The entire CIA and intelligence community is against it. And there's a reason that Angela Merkel is trying to stop you. It's because it's a bad idea. And then Bush goes, I can handle angle like, no, you stupid. This isn't about her. It's about why she disagrees with you about this. But Fiona Hill wasn't man enough to say, no, you stupid, that the point is not about Germany. The point is about Russia. That's why Germany has a problem. Russia. And so Hill and Rice absolutely failed to stop him. And so, yeah, of course, then they turn around and go, oh, yeah, and Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning when I'm sick of it. It's ridiculous.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, I could, like anybody else, stand for it from my, you know, you know, the, the. You have the types who think everything when it comes to, you know, war is about money. And it's just about the, you know, military industrial complex getting paid and all that. And the problem I always have with that theory, not that there's not an element of that going on, but there's a million different ways for the military industrial complex to make their money. Like, you don't have to go messing around with the largest nuclear power on the planet to do that. And you know, part of it, I think maybe, you know, looking at it from that perspective though, you know, you would say that like, Russia is a country that is big enough and powerful enough to be a credible enemy. Not powerful enough, short of their nuclear force, to be like a real threat, you know, militarily to like come at us, but credible enough that we can continue to sell this conflict with them and everything. But, and, but, and we're not like so tied in with them economically like China or they're not as big of an economy as China that, you know, we can actually afford to do this. Like, we don't have a bunch of microchips or rare earths or whatever that we need coming from Russia or something like we do with China. And so I, I get it from that like, angle. But there's a, and this goes back even to like right when, after Maidan happened. I mean, it was not something that's developed over the last 12 years is there's. From so many of our officials and, and especially ones in Europe, there's this like really visceral hatred of Russia. And you know, I like, I know Bob Gates, he said in an interview, he was asked about our different approaches to Russia and China. And he said that one of the things that had happened is when we set up our China desk, just, you know, sort of collectively speaking at all the different agencies and everything. Because, you know, this is actually like, I, I was fascinated. I was reading a book about Dulles, the Dulles brothers, back in the day, and they were talking about when they were standing up the OSS because the US was, you know, going to go to war in, in Europe, that he was literally bringing in immigrants from Holland and stuff, and like having them draw maps of like where the docks were and stuff, because America was not an empire yet. Like, we didn't have this sprawling intelligence network across the world. Like, that's the level we were at. And so we had to like, stand up all those desks. You know, we just, we didn't have these pre existing networks. And so with China, you need people who speak Chinese, you need people who understand China. Who, who do we have? Who does that? Well, it was missionaries, kids mostly, and they love China. They thought China was great. They went there as missionaries. The people were nice and kind. They had a good opinion. And that kind of became the culture of the China desk. Like, across the government, the Russia desk, the Soviet desk, was stood up all by people who were, you know, run out by Stalin or were refugees from, you know, the Bolshevik revolution or they were ethnic minorities, like a lot of Jews from the very, very beginning who just, you know, had a very bad experience in Russia and carried that animosity over and really saw the United States as a. A tool to carry on a war against this awful country. And the thing is, like, you know, when I was. When I was with the dod, there was this one destroyer, one ship that I won't say which one it was, but it was just the nightmare ship. Nobody wanted to go there. Everything was always broken. Nobody knew anything. Everybody hated being at work every single day. Every sailor hated being at work every day. It was just awful. It was just terrible. And that ship started off with a. Like, when it was commissioned back in the early 2000s, with a really bad chain of command and just an apathetic crew and everything. The culture broke down. We would come back, like, 10 years later, 12 years later, and you've got a completely different chain. I mean, every. It's been, you know, it's not just that there's a different chain of command. It's been turned over, like, three or four times at this point. You know, the people who are on the ship now are the replacements of the replacements of the replacements of the original people. And the culture was still the same. And it's. Because, you know, you don't take everybody off the ship at once and send them packing and bring a new crew in. One guy leaves, another guy comes and takes his place, and he gets worked into the culture. And so it persists. And it really takes, like, a revolutionary sort of, you know, leader. You know, like a. Like a really charismatic, effective leader to turn something like that around. And you've seen this, I think, in, you know, in. In our diplomacy with regard to Russia and China, how that culture has just persisted over the long term. That started out bad, and then we continued to staff it with, like, people who. Exiles, you know, refugees, people who just had a. An ax to grind from the day one of taking, you know, the job. I mean, you saw. You wrote about this in the 90s. It was like. It's fascinating when you're going through all of the people who played, like, the major roles and you're like, okay, so you've got Meline Albright, you know, a Czech Jew who, you know, everybody knows what happened in Prague, you know, back in the Soviet days, like real negative feelings as far as that went. You had even, like, even though I think, you know, he had. He was a little more measured about it. The. Who was the, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Salakashvili. Right, right. And so you have a Georgian who, I think he was a Georgian who had been raised in Poland. So you like, double whammy there. And so just across the board, it's like a bunch of Eastern Europeans or their kids who just hate Russia, like, really viscerally. And somehow, you know, maybe when there was. When we had like the. George Kennan's in charge, you know, the, the old senior statesmen who were kind of just the old Carol Quigley Anglo establishment types who really like, you know, like, ran the country at the highest level that they were able to sort of control, you know, how. How far this went, you know, and the direction it took. But then once they were off the scene and got too old, they weren't replaced by serious people and the fanatics, you know, just were able to run rampant. It seems like that's where we're at. You know, how else. It's just, otherwise, it's just impossible to explain. Like, the people who, the people in Russia look at Putin and say that Putin has just been so accommodating and blah. That is 100% true. Like, if I was, if I was a Russian watching him, I'd be like, what are we doing? Like, why don't you just go over there and lick the President United States boots? Like, this is ridiculous. Trying again. And I'm not talking about, like, just since 2014. I'm especially talking about before that, really, really obviously trying to, to, you know, make Russia a palatable friend to the west and just getting spit in the face, like, over and over and over and over. And, you know, it makes no sense strategically. It makes no, you know, unless, you know, I guess, like, you could say strategically, if, you know, if we're focused on maintaining American control of the European continent, we need Russia as an enemy because otherwise they're going to necessarily be a competitor for influence in Europe. And we don't want that. We want there to be just a wall between Europe and Russia. But I just don't get it, man. And I really hope, you know, that we don't. And this is something that's, I think, possible because of our media environment and the way that it just completely fails to prepare people for emerging events, you know, that were predictable in hindsight, but that is that we're gonna, like, we could wake up one day and there has been a major escalation that we cannot go back from, you know, and everybody's gonna be like, what happened? It's like, well, go read provoked, first of all, and you'll understand what happened. But it's just, you know, I'm sort of dreading that day. And it doesn't mean it's like you're gonna wake up to, like, you know, every city in Russia, in the US Being a smoking crater, but I mean, just, you know, stepping up to a. I mean, like, I, like, I was thinking about this the other day, trying to game out, like, what would happen if Russia. Not nuclear or anything like that, but they hit a bunch of warehouses and processing stations, you know, transfer stations and stuff in Estonia and Laia, you know, or in eastern Poland. They hit a bunch of, like, military targets, credible military, credibly, military targets. But now they're attacking NATO countries directly. Like, that's like, they're not. They do not seem that far from doing that. Like, they. It seems like that is maybe one or two small escalations away for them at this point. And I don't know if you can really, like, go back from that once it happens. Like, we may just have to, like, really fight this out. And that's scary because, you know, yeah, I don't want to get nuked, I

[Scott Horton]

think especially when all the attention is diverted to the Middle east and the whole thing is just kind of coasting and we're letting the European states decide these policies for us, and they're all, you know, little brother talking tough with big brother standing behind him. Kind of a moral hazard sort of situation going on. They should not be allowed to drive. You know what I mean? They, you know, they want to serve a purpose in our European policy, then maybe, but otherwise they should shut up. You know, but the Brits, and the polls especially, are constantly causing trouble and making things worse. The Brits are bragging about helping the Ukrainians develop new longer range missiles because we can't give them longer range missiles. Oh, but we can help them develop them, and then that's deniable enough. No hard feelings, right? Russia, you know, kind of thing. Just trying to be too cute by half on all of this stuff. So. And I agree that it's not that we're like, on an inevitable path to nuclear war, but we are risking it and we have increased the risk by whatever percentage. I don't know. You can't exactly quantify it, but people are just whistling past the graveyard on this stuff. You know, I saw a tweet. This was a tweet by what's her name, Annie Jacobson, that wrote the nuclear war scenario book. And, and she was saying, look, you people should be worried. You know, you act like this isn't a threat, but it really is. And you know, for someone like her, she's sort of the quintessential New Yorker writer or something like that. She's not the type who. Alarmist or crazy or like, you know what I mean? You could tell that she's like, a little reticent to like, really beat the drum loud and, and cause too much attention, but she's like, guys, you know, hello over here. This is really dangerous. You know, William Perry, I don't think he's dead yet, maybe almost. But when he got old, he helped found Global Zero with Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, and all these people who were like, spent a career in this said, you know what, man? They dedicate the last years of their lives to lobbying against nuclear weapons or at least signing on to joint statements about it where they didn't work hard enough on it. But, you know, William Perry was like, listen, man, this was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense. He's like, listen, you just don't understand the power of these machines to kill so many people in one shot in this way. I mean, you're talking about you could kill a major city with just one or two of these things. You know, make Houston uninhabitable with just

[Daryl Cooper]

a couple of H bombs.

[Scott Horton]

It's unthinkable, man. And, you know, the, the H bombs especially, they're in the high kilotons or low megaton range. I mean, these things, the, the strategic nuclear weapons, these are for wiping cities off the face of the earth with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed in an instant in each of them. You know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those are what we now call battlefield nukes. Tactical nuclear weapons. Ten and fifteen kilotons. And they killed a hundred thousand and seventy five thousand in one shot each. You know, so, you know, there's an anecdote from Jack Kennedy talking with his staff over Cuba. And they said, well, if he said, if we get in a nuclear war, and, and we will be, the estimated casualties if the Russians hit one city. And the Air Force general says, well, sir, we think it would be about 600,000. And Kennedy says 600,000 is what we lost in the Civil War and we haven't gotten over that in a hundred years.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's the most optimistic like vision of how a nuclear war could go.

[Scott Horton]

One H bomb. That's, that's the Soviets demonstrating that they're willing to nuke a city. Don't make them nuke anymore. That's when we've already gotten to that point. And of course at that point everybody dies. At that point it's use them or lose them, you know. So anyway, I don't want to like be the world's worst scaremonger about that because again, I'm not predicting it, but it's the kind of thing Samuel Cherup from Rand Corporation, he's like, well it's a low probability, high impact consequence.

[Daryl Cooper]

Actually, you know, the thing to do probably is just to make a career out of predicting that it'll never happen because if it does happen, nobody's going to be around to say you were wrong. So like I, I, I think I, I saw somebody somewhere like on Poly Market or one of those betting sites that I don't know if it's still on there, seems pretty stupid but like that they actually had on there. You could bet on whether Jesus was going to return this year. And I'm like, well just obviously that. Just say no because if he does, then whatever, like who cares? It's all over with.

[Scott Horton]

Take your golden escalator up to heaven. All right, look, we should take a few super chats, but first let me tell you about the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. This is everything I know. And guess what? Just today we finally uploaded the second half of the Cold War course. So now my terror war course and both halves of my Cold War course and Ukraine war and everything is done [e-mail] and look, there's me on the Joe Rogan Show. So how do you like that for argument from authority? I was a guest on the Joe Rogan show so I know what I'm talking about. And also Ron Paul likes me obviously. And here I am saying things to Tucker Carlson and here I am humiliating Bill Crystal. So you know what you're getting. And then so here's my guys, man, the great Jim Bovard, Ramsey Barud, Adam Francisco and Bill Bubert. And then coming up we are adding next week we're adding the heroic Grant F. Smith, the author of Big Israel and about seven or nine more books about the Israel lobby in the United States. And his course is going to be on the foundation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee by Isaiah Kenan was the guy's name, who was the Israeli agent who created the thing. And then so of course he goes all into JFK and rfk trying to register him as foreign agents and all of that stuff and everything. It's the great Grant of Smith, if you don't know, from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, which is just a gigantic website full of PDF files from foia lawsuits from Grant Smith. Just having these guys in number four for years. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and show you. I can't help it. Watch this. Dude, check it out. These are all the books that Grant wrote about the Israel lobby in the United States of America. Dude, that's our guy. All right, Israel Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy. And his new course is on the foundation of APAC. So that is Scott Hortonacademy.com Sign up for it. Oh, yeah. Oh, you know what I should have done? I'll send a note to Harley right now and we'll make it promo code Independence Day and then you'll save 10% off. How about that? Here, let me send a message to Harley right now so I don't forget. Please make promo code indeed. Oh, yeah. And that way we'll celebrate. And Everybody, you get 10% off. You do the thing, you get the academy, you learn all the stuff. And I hope everybody's really excited. I put a lot of work into doing that Cold war course and taking you through all of this stuff. So I hope people are stoked that finally the second half of that thing is available. And I'm sorry it took so long. I had to move and do other things. But it's finally done and I'm hard at work on the audiobook as well. If you're audiobook fans, very soon the W. Bush chapter and the Obama chapters will be done for you there and so on. So anyway, now with that, let me just show them the Martyr Maid podcast. That's my man here. Marta Maid Daryl Cooper, and his extremely long form history podcast series is that he does, which you all will enjoy so very much. And here's my substack is scottward show.com. this is my other show, my interview show. And here you can see I interviewed Brandon Weickert, who is absolutely great. I think you'll like him. Oh, and then this one. I don't know if you heard this story, man. Bud Cummins. I didn't ask him if he's related to the family that developed the diesel thing there for the price. But hey, man, the point is that. Look, ATF murdered this guy, Brian Malinowski, and it was just like a Waco raid. 6 o' clock in the morning. They raid his house. He's protecting his wife. He pulls out a gun to protect his wife, and they shoot him in the head and kill him. And the thing is, he was the director of the local airport and a gun collector. And what had happened was they had busted some criminals with guns that they had gotten from him. And then they just made up all this crap about how he's the kingpin in this gun smuggling ring and all this stuff, which was total crap. Dude, he was just sold guns as a hobby at the gun shows like everybody else, and they murdered him.

[Daryl Cooper]

Did this just happen like they killed him recently?

[Scott Horton]

No, this is in 24. And this guy Bud Cummins is his lawyer. And this guy Cummins is a former U.S. attorney and is representing the widow. Suing them over it. Of course, there's no accountability whatsoever, you know, criminally. They haven't even had an official investigation, official report of any kind. You know, the whole thing is just sick.

[Daryl Cooper]

But whatever.

[Scott Horton]

Anyway, if you sign up for the Scott Horton show substack, that's also how you get the audiobook. When I put out audiobook sections coming soon. And then also here real quick is Liberty stickers. Since we were talking about Star wars earlier, I'll show you that libertystickers.com everybody else's stickers suck. And okay, that's it for the ads. Buy my books and everybody else's [e-mail] Books Now. Mr. Cooper, you want to take some super chats from these super people?

[Daryl Cooper]

Oh, yeah, let's do it.

[Scott Horton]

They're super donating to us. So here, let me rewind to the top and page down and look for the color ones. Here's a big yellow one. Let me say shout to Scott for getting Brandon Weiker on the. On the Tom woods bump. Yes. So I did. Tom woods said to me, who should I interview about this? I said, you should get him on. If Scott said he was 76 years old, I'd believe him. Hey, I always looked young for my age. What the hell happened? Great man. Theory of history, the progressive movement, socialist history, social structures and collective forces. Not even seems to be disparate. Oh, well, that's interesting. So I guess he's putting the. The people do things. History versus the tide of the course of events sort of way of looking at things. You know, saddle shmaddle. It was all because this one lord killed that king and, you know, led to the reformation of the. What you call. And I think it can be both.

[Daryl Cooper]

It is both, and both are always elements in any historical event. But, you know, it's a sliding scale, and sometimes it's more on one side and sometimes it's more on the other. Like, if you go to, you know, look at, like, the Aztec and Inca empires, like that was. These are great civilizations, you know, in the classical sense, that were destroyed because a bunch of badass Spaniards, like, went over there and destroyed them, you know, and it wasn't a necessity of history that that was going to happen or something. It was.

[Scott Horton]

You.

[Daryl Cooper]

You really required some remarkable personalities and. And very specific sort of confluence of forces for that to happen. And, you know, but then on the other hand, I mean, there's still an element of, you know, where the Spanish and just Western European technology and need to expand over the Pacific due to the Ottomans, you know, closing down all of the supplies of sugar and other things that were coming from the east and like, all of these other things that are definitely involved, but you couldn't have got it done without some really, really remarkable individuals, of course.

[Scott Horton]

Yep. I think that's right, man. It's all the big, you know, mixed things. This is, you know, the, like, the leftist thing about the tabula rasa, where, like, everybody's born a blank slate. And not only that, but they're born such a blank slate that you can turn a boy into a girl if you just call him Sally. You're wearing, like, geez. I don't think the slates come, like, completely blank. Like, I think there's got to be a little bit of nature in with that nurture. No, I don't know. Here's one for you, Mr. Cooper. They're all making fun of how old I am. This guy says, when you think Scott's an old man, then you find out he's younger than you. What in the world, dude? Is it because I'm going so dang bald? It's not my fault I'm going bald. I got too much testosterone, dude. Daryl, do you think your voice sounds weird on tape? I don't. It sounds matter of fact to me. I don't know if he. Your voice or his own.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, of course. I hate hearing my voice and seeing my face, either one of those. I just. Yeah, I absolutely hate.

[Scott Horton]

I used to be weirded out by my voice. Oh, I really sound like that. But now it sounds like me. I just got Used to it. Doing radio all those years or whatever,

[Daryl Cooper]

you know, kind of, but.

[Scott Horton]

And also, I'm incredibly handsome, so no problem there.

[Daryl Cooper]

Should have seen you in your younger days, like back, you know, and what. How old are you? Back in the 40s?

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, back when. I'm still in my 40s for another couple weeks, thank you very much. But, yeah, I mean.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, back in the 40s. I mean, back in, like, the 1940s, bro.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah. And I used to be, like, five inches taller. If drones were available to the French Resistance, there would have been an SS officer left in occupied France. Oh, there would not have been. Yeah, sounds. Sounds right. A little argument about the future war and oops. And how drones are changing at all.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, they better hope so, because there also wouldn't have been a D Day landing.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, that's true. You know, somebody brought up on a show I was on the other day, boy, the next war in America is going to be crazy, man. Oh, it was. Somebody told me he went and bought a drone for a couple hundred bucks, and he was just. I guess it occurred to him that, like, this thing could carry a grenade. And then, I mean, the possibilities are just endless, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, we've seen people mount guns on them and put them on, you know, synchro servo systems that. That mirror the. The camera, I mean, and do it accurately. It's. It's all possible.

[Scott Horton]

This guy says he couldn't do it, but. Yeah, you could if you were mad enough. That was your job. And their drone guy got your guy a minute ago. And so now it's on Jordan Peterson. I think he's scum. I never was impressed by him whatsoever. And I read this hilarious thing by this communist named Nathan Robinson, who writes this journal called Current Affairs. And he's very commie, but at least he hates Israel. But anyway, he wrote this article about Jordan Peterson and about what an absolute fraud he is and how he diffuses all these big words and lots of italics to try to make just absolute idiot. Basic truisms seem like these profound breakthroughs of, you know, meaningful whatever. And essentially all he's saying is, like, you know, you should be generous, but don't be too generous, because then someone could take advantage of you. Right? Which is like, yeah, your grandma could tell you that when you're seven or whatever. Right? It's just a truism.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, but most of the things that your grandma could tell you when you were seven or. I mean, I think he was. I think Peterson was a man of his moment. Like, when he came out for sure, there's just no denying the impact he had on a lot of people. And you know, he, probably his most famous, like little one liner or whatever is clean your room. And it's one of those things that like you said your grandma could, your grandma did tell you that like, and everybody knows it's better if you clean your room than if you don't and if you have a habit of cleaning your room rather than not whatever. But you know, like a point he was kind of making with that, with that is very similar to, I guess the, you know, Jocko's motto, discipline equals freedom. You know, it's sort of a, you know, it's, it's sort of a paradox that if you restrict your, if you restrict your, you know, just moment to moment freedom by disciplining yourself and forcing yourself to do unpleasant things like in the moment, that, that'll actually give you what people really like, want when they say they want freedom, which is agency, the ability to go do something because you have a lot of people. I mean, like I, I. The reason, I think he blew up so powerfully when he did, I don't think it was the tranny stuff. I don't really think it was the political stuff in general. I think people liked what he had to say about free speech because of what was going on at the time, but I think it was because, and we're, I don't even know if we're starting to see this now, but like, you know, there is a, a mental health crisis among people under, you know, 40, 50 years old or so in this country that is not, forget about like the record suicide rates, spiking levels of depression and anxiety and all these kind of things. That's all like the, the really acute stuff is all at record highs and that's all, that's all definitely true, but among like people who manage to keep it together, people who get, get, get up, they have a job that they're not going to get fired from. And you know, if you look at their life, it seems like they've got their act together but are just on the, on the edge of like losing their mind, you know, and feeling like it's all going to fall apart like at any moment that is like an epidemic. And so, you know, he was really reaching those people, you know, those that, that was his audience really. And I think he did help a lot of people by, you know, again, taking something that was really just sort of a simple truism, but getting them to treat it like, it was profound in a way that drove their behavior, you know, because I think where the. Clean the room came from, I. I think he was giving a lecture, a talk or something, and, you know, he was talking about patience. He would get into his practice who were just completely paralyzed in their life. They couldn't do anything. Like, they. They'd spill a milkshake on their kitchen floor, and it would just stay there for months because they just could not gather the agency to, like, go clean it up, you know, and not because. Not even because they're on their bed, you know, clutching their sheets, crying all day. They just like, there's this sort of heaviness and apathy that just makes. That paralyzes them. And so he would, you know, instead of telling, you know, people, okay, here's how you're going to fix your life. Here's how you're going to go out and change all of these things about, you know, the climb out of this pit your personality's fallen into is we're just going to, like, focus on. You're going to get. Keep your room clean. And once you can do that on a consistent basis, then we'll think about keeping your house clean. And then once you keep expanding out from there until you have, like, more and more of a zone of competency where you feel like, you know, you can do something in the world and you don't live in this sort of, you know, the, The. The. This fuzzy brain fog dominated kind of life where, you know, it's like, if you, like, you know, my wife's a really good cook. I know how to make a few dishes. I don't know how to cook in the sense that, like, if you show me a pantry full of just ingredients that I can whip something up. In fact, if you show me that pantry full of ingredients, to me, I mean, it's just. You might as well just show me a blank screen. Like, it's like, yeah, I know what paprika is, but I have no idea how you use it. So it really is not even a real thing to me. I don't even have any idea what any of this is. It might as well just be like a, you know, a bunch of shelves full of books in another language or something. But if you're competent in cooking, then you look at that, and that has a lot of meaning to you. There's a bunch of things that are, you know, that. That are meaningful, that you can actually go out and do things with. And so you have a. A totally different. It actually Stimulates and activates your mind, as opposed to me. When I look at it, my eyes glaze over and my brain goes so foggy and I'm like, well, people go through their whole lives like that because they look around, they don't feel competent at anything, you know, and this is the stuff he was speaking to. And you know, it's very sad what's happened to him. I mean, you really saw and I don't. Look, I hate his Israel stuff and all of the, a lot of the political nonsense, for sure. I think he's ridiculous on that. But, you know, I, I, I think that what you saw sort of in real time, like I remember back in the day, he would do these like, just grainy webcam sort of like interactions with his audience. You know, at nighttime it's like dark and like the only light on his face is from the screen and it's all kind of creepy. And dude, like on a routine basis he would like break down crying over all these things, which, you know, it was endearing the first time. But then when it happens again and again and again, you realize, oh, this isn't just something he feels so strongly about. Like, this is kind of an unstable personality. Like on some level, not like a crazy person, but somebody who's like, there's some, there's some really like, uncontrollable emotion, like right under the surface here. And when you took that personality and you put it out into an environment where, I mean, I mean, he had every media organization in the world trying to destroy him, trying to just really coming after him, you put it under that kind of pressure and he cracked, you know, and it's, it's sad to watch that happen in real time.

[Scott Horton]

Well, I always thought he was an idiot because I never paid attention to all that stuff because I have a dad. So, like, I don't.

[Daryl Cooper]

Okay. No, that's exactly right, though. That's exactly right. And I know the people he was reaching.

[Scott Horton]

No, I get it, I get it. But I never paid any attention to that. And then the one thing I ever really saw of him is he was saying, don't pay attention to politics at all. Don't pay attention to anything outside of your own life. Don't worry about all these other things. That's not your responsibility. Just clean your room. Just go get a job for a low hourly wage and do your little thing and whatever, and then that's it. And then the next thing I heard from him was, oh, no, you should have politics after all. Serve Israel. Yeah, see what happened was I got money. So now here I am doing an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben Shapiro sitting at the head of the table, supervising. And now I'm here to tell you that, no, you do need to have politics after all. Young man, clean your room, get your act together, and go serve Israel. Go join the army and die for Israel. Grow up, have a son, and put your son in the army so your son can die for Israel. Get up, clean your room, go to work in the morning, and pay your taxes so that Israel can kill children with your money. I'm Jordan Peterson, the great teacher of American responsibility from Canada. Like you, dude.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, you know, it was him, dude.

[Scott Horton]

I think that he should eat more and more and more pills.

[Daryl Cooper]

It was interesting because, you know, he was one of. And there's, there's so many of these types, right, where, like, he, he, he, he rose to fame as, like, a person who was dissenting against whatever was going on, you know, the stuff, but free speech in general, whatever. And that's how he, like, came into the public eye and, and grew his audience. But then as his message sort of like. And this was, you could see this actually, like, from the beginning, if you were paying attention to the right things, that what his message amounted to was just maintain the status quo and accept it. You know, it was like he would talk a lot about, like, dominance hierarchies versus competency hierarchies. And there's a reason that the people who run the banks run the banks because they're so smart and they're just so great. And the people who are in power should be there because, gosh, if you got there, then you're amazing and everybody should just sort of go along with that and like, you know, sort of similar to, like, you know, it's always funny to me, you know, the. Who's that guy? It's like the, the skeptic guy, Michael Shermer. You know what I'm talking about? I think he made, like, Skeptic Magazine. His whole thing is that we're going to be skeptical. And what this thing actually is, is we're going to be skeptical of every theory. That is not like the mainstream story of whatever.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, exactly, right.

[Daryl Cooper]

So boring stuff.

[Scott Horton]

This is what actually turned me off of libertarianism, was that kind of attitude among the Reason Magazine guys. I was like, well, apparently Ron Paul's the only libertarian with any courage. I'd rather hang out with the Birchers and the militia guys because at least they care about the Branch Davidians and Stuff like I was saying before. It was later on that I found the Mises Institute and was like, oh, there's a whole building full of these guys. I had no idea because it was exactly that kind of skeptic crap that that turned me away from it. Anyway, all I need to know about Ukraine was watching the press gang footage. Yeah, I mean, that is a huge one. I don't know, like, what percentage of their conscript army are literally kidnapped in that way, but the ones who show up and stand on the line are slaves just the same. And it's really important to make that distinction between a conscript army versus a volunteer army and people talking about, well, Ukraine doesn't want to quit fighting yet. Well, their political leaders don't, and their slave army that has no choice but to stay at the front, and. Which, by the way, they have hundreds of thousands awol. And there have been, you know, at least dozens have died in the river Tisla trying to escape across to Romania. Apparently, it's some really rough waters. People drown trying to get the hell out of the country. Hundreds of thousands awol, according to ap. So, yeah, it is really ugly. Hell of a war over there, man. It's World War I, but with drones and the tempo is less. Right? The artillery and the machine gun fire. It ain't Exactly World War I, but other than that, it is. I mean, trenches and, and artillery and tank rounds and machine gun fire and just plus drones. And it really sucks for everybody over there, for sure. All right, this guy says this may be silly, but any advice either of you have for one who wants to be a history professor, graduated Seton hall this past May, thinking about law or history, what do you say, Coop?

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, you know, it's extraordinarily competitive, obviously. You know, you go to any graduate level history class in any university in the country and you got 30 guys all vying for the one job that their professor has. And so it's. It's tough, I would say, in this day and age. Just keep your options open, man. Like, you know, if you could. I mean, I'm not a history professor, obviously, but I probably speak to more people about history than any professor has or does through his books or lectures or anything else. And there are a lot of ways to make that happen that, that don't involve sort of jumping through the hoops of getting a job in academia. There's a lot of ways to do that now. And. And if you're good at it and diligent at it to. To make it work for you. So as far as, like, if you're dead set on the university system, I mean, I would just say be prepared to play the game, because you're going to have to.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, better you than me, man. I went to college for a little while and decided to not go to school anymore. Putin will be the last pro Western, at least USA President of Russia. The Euro leaders have tied their political future to a Russian threat. I don't know, I mean, probably right? I saw, I was on Kyle's show today and he played a clip of Putin's recent speech and I'm like, man, we should be thanking our lucky stars that we have someone who is so cool, calm and collected apparently at all times. Like, the only time I've read about him actually being, like, visibly pissed off was after the Bezlan attack when then George Bush, you know, took bin Laden's side basically, and he was madder than hell about that. But otherwise he's just like, even in the, in the worst part of this war, he's like, you know, we have some disagreements with our American partners, and that's why we need to work on expanding our dialogue and common understanding as we negotiate this dangerous world where we have mutual problems that need to be addressed. And I'm like, man, now that's my kind of psychopath dude, where he just does not get worked up at all, apparently, and is like, everything is just business. And so, yeah, we should absolutely be thinking, our lucky stars we got a guy like that in the Kremlin right now. I mean, you look at me at Bedev and I know me at Bedev is he plays this role. When he was president, he was not this way. But you look at him, on the average day, he talks mad and even threatens nuclear war and says, you know, gets really God dang upset. And he'll probably be the president again next after Putin when he finally dies in office, whenever that'll be. But yeah, I don't know why we should expect for the next Russian leader to be any more cool, calm, insane than Putin. Virtually any Russian man you put in there is going to be more of an emotional case than this guy. And boy, do they have a lot to be upset about. Right? That's the implication here. You get a guy who ticks off easy. We could be in a lot of trouble, dude. And what was this thing? The Euro leaders have tied their political future to a Russian threat, I think. Yeah, that's important. A huge incentive that they have to keep everything going.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, it's also their, their you know, do it all tool for crushing political dissent. Like what happened in Romania. You know, they were going to elect that EU skeptic president and they said, oh, he's got. He's too close to Russia or he has the wrong. And so they actually like banned him from the. Banned him from the election. And that's just sort of the go to move.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. Somebody said, I didn't pay enough for the bots tonight. First of all, I don't have any money. Second of all, don't we always usually have like right around 800 to a th000 live viewers?

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I think so. I don't even know how to. I don't. I don't know how to.

[Scott Horton]

I. I think maybe the numbers were a little higher when we were on Fridays and they got a. Get used to our new showtime. That's all. Imagine paying bots to watch your live YouTube stream. Goodness. Always thought the fact that George Washington. Oh, I was supposed to put this on the screen. I always thought the fact George Washington had absolute power and willingly gave it up is a prideful thing. Only instance in history. I know. Well, there's one more big one is Cincinnatus, the Roman leader that Cincinnati is named after. And that's who they call George Washington, the American Cincinnatus, because the story of Cincinnatus was that he was called up to fight the Visigoths, I think it was. And he had retired from the Senate and was working on his farm and they asked him to take charge of the Roman army and he did, and he defeated the enemy. And then he resigned and went back to his farm. And I think even he did that twice. And so he was known as this guy who refused to, you know, hang on to power and didn't want it. And that was the precedent of George Washington, that Washington was following that he resigned his commission rather than attempting to hold on to power. So. Yeah, man, let's see. Is that all? No, here's a couple more. Daryl, I love all your recommendations. King of Dogs, Crowbar. Fantastic. Gotta say, recently watched the Fountain and I don't know what on earth they was that. By the way, Daryl, I was supposed to tell you this a long time ago. Is my wife's favorite movie supposed to tell you that so that you could have that in common?

[Daryl Cooper]

Nice. We could be friends.

[Scott Horton]

Love me so much. So then you should have your movie in common too.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, I'll tell you what. I'll. I'll. I'll write up a substack post or Do a. Do a substack podcast about the fountain and why I like it so much.

[Scott Horton]

Okay. I remember it looking very fancy or something. I don't know. I don't. I don't really care about stuff like that. They really believe they can build an EU army? Those people don't seem like they're raring to go. You know what? They're going to have to if America would ever get the hell out of there. But I don't think it would have to be much of one. Right? It would just be. You get Britain, France, Germany and Poland to all create an army that's just big enough that they don't break it up and fight. Keep them all together and then sign a new treaty with Russia and then everybody's happy and without us there, all their moral hazards gone and everybody has to back down from all their idiot, you know, high horse positions. I think we're done with the super chats here, buddy boy.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, they should. They could always solve their, you know, their demographic problems by arming their Muslim populations and sending them off to Ukraine. They would join the army. Right? They still. They still want to fight cause.

[Scott Horton]

Solve a couple of problems at the same time there. Hey, here's a quote from Cincinnatus. How come I have to keep teaching you this lesson? Old Republic. Is that a real quote? I don't know. All right, Happy Independence Day, everybody. Hope you had a good time. This has been provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to

[Daryl Cooper]

help us beat the propaganda algorithm.

[Scott Horton]

Go follow at ProvokedShow on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked.